The next step for student media?
Gannett Co. has always been a trailblazer among U.S. newspaper chains: USA Today was the first major American newspaper to use color, and they have made inroads into the coveted younger demographic that other chains can only dream of.
So it may not come as a surprise that last week, the company announced what might be the biggest news out of Gannett in a generation. Then again… maybe it is.
The Tallahassee Democrat, which is owned by Gannett, is acquiring the Florida State FSView, a completely student-run and previously independent demiweekly. Gannett corporate sees this as a way to give the newspaper the in that it needs to reach a younger demographic. (Apparently adding color and infographics wasn’t cutting it.)
What intrigues me is that FSView is supposed to become sort of a sister publication to the Democrat, maybe like RedEye or AM New York.
I’m not sure I buy the advantages of such an acquisition, for that purpose. One of the things that makes AMny and RedEye successful, to the extent that they are, is that they’re produced on a near-shoestring budget, using sibling-publication and wire content and mostly staff pulled from elsewhere in the newsroom. On the other hand, what keeps a student newspaper afloat is unpaid and underpaid staff. This raises the question: Is FSView about to become a cash cow for Gannett? (To answer my question, no. I think it may hurt ad sales, actually. More later.)
For Gannett’s purposes, I think a smarter acquisition might have been a student daily in a market where they don’t already have a sibling publication. By funneling resources into, a paper like the Michigan State State News, or the Daily Californian, or, hell, my alma-mater paper the Daily Northwestern, Gannett might be able to get their hands on those younger non-readers and bring in advertising dollars and new ad-unit eyeballs in a market where they aren’t getting any.
It makes one wonder what, exactly, such an acquisition would look like. I don’t know the particulars of the FSView, but if Gannett bought the Daily, there would be an interesting range of advantages for both parties. Gannett would gain an inroad into an advertising market they flat-out can’t reach, and if they invested in a bigger news hole they might be able to make it a sort of Chicagoland student-oriented daily newspaper. The Daily might be the ideal choice for that kind of acquisition because of its excellent staff: A 12- to 20-page college daily with high-quality staff content and virtually no wire is nearly a foreign species. And of course, the Daily would become either thicker (i.e., more pages) or bigger (i.e., bigger pages) in the expansion, and probably gain the expertise of some of the best writers at other Chicago colleges in the process. They might also get a non-horrible ad staff.
That would make the Daily a sort of boutique newspaper, along the lines of RedEye but even more targeted. Rather than “young urban professionals who ride the train,” it would be “18- to 22-year-old college students in and around Chicago.” It would make the newspaper market more like the magazine market, with small runs of free dailies to target untapped ad dollars in otherwise-claimed media markets. It would also make the American newspaper market more closely mimic the European newspaper market — which, depending on your view, could be either a good or a bad thing.
My general impression of this deal is that that approach, which gains ad-market share for a company versus its rivals by buying college dailies, rather than at its own expense, is probably the acquisition-minded tactic that makes sense. It’s unlikely that it will cost the Democrat a single reader, but the ad-sales synergies such a deal generates might also not outweigh the discounts advertisers are sure to demand now. What I mean by that is that advertisers are likely to say, “Listen, if I run this ad in the Democrat and in FSView, I want to pay significantly less than rate card for the combination.” The fact that they could, and may, have just one ad staff for the two may very well not outweigh lost revenue from cross-selling. Newspaper advertisers aren’t as savvy as magazine advertisers, but suffice it to say, the less overlap on the audience Venn diagram, the closer to rate-card Gannett can charge. And I would wager a lot of FSView advertisers are already advertising in the Democrat, which poses an even thornier issue, of whether those advisers are flat-out going to demand discounts or pull their ads entirely. Can Gannett afford to push its advertisers that way?
This kind of deal doesn’t have to be broken in practice. In principle, it makes sense that the American media market is due for a big correction. As the cost of plating a newspaper decreases, and as presses that can be easily switched from one physical format to another become more available, it stands to reason that they would increasingly be game for more targeted advertising. (The boom in zoned editions of newspapers hardly benefits just readers; quite often, those zoned editions are produced to sell ads, and it’s not uncommon for different zones to have different ads.) On the other hand, it costs a lot to start up a newspaper, and if you can piggy-back on a brand like a well-known and large-circulation college daily, maybe it’s not such a bad idea.
The reason I think this particular deal is bad is because of, well, the particulars. It seems to me that it’s a bad idea for a newspaper to cannibalize its own ad market while retaining a separate newsroom and production overhead.
In short, I don’t think this is going to make Gannett money. But it may be the first wave of the next frontier, the great magazine-ization of American newspapers. After all, the paper product is still profitable, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
commenting closed for this article